William J Holler

59604131, Sep 28, 1999

Mar 5, 1996

8/611999

James A. Amon - Souderton PA
William R. Holler - Bethlehem PA

G06F 1760

705 28

The prior art invention entitled Automated End Tally System, has been augmented to include either a scanning radar unit (22c) or a phased array scanning radar unit (42c), for the purposes of additionally obtaining unit interior topological information. Such interior information is required to determine an accurate tally count in the case where two or three boards such as (13), (14), and (15), have been longitudinally aligned to span the entire board row (11b) of a given coarse (10b) (a technique referred to as "nesting"). In the case of scanning radar unit (22c), this additional interior topology information is gathered by emitting a focused pulsed incident scanning energy beam (38a), which is of an energy chosen to be transmissive to paper wrap materials (8) which might be covering unit (10) and to the lumber of unit (10) itself. As beam (38a) transmits through "nested" boards such as (13) and (14) it will encounter a board row break such as (16) where the two boards are abutted. Either board end (13b) or (14a), which define this break, will have been previously demarcated during unit construction by a reflective material.